Turn Bluetooth On and Off from Command Line on macOS

By  on  
bluetooth

Bluetooth has been a revelation in wireless technology: wireless mice, headphones, streaming devices, and a variety of home and office environments.  It goes without saying that wireless peripherals are so much easier to manage than wired counterparts, especially mice, that I usually have my MacBook's bluetooth turned on.

There are times, however, that I move my laptop away from the mouse (OK, I admit:  the kitchen) where the bluetooth connection is still in range but with the mouse still connected, I can't use my laptop's touchpad, leaving me to only use my keyboard which is an annoyance.  That led me to finding blueutil, a command line utility for macOS that lets me turn Bluetooth on and off with one command!

Start by installing blueutil with HomeBrew:

brew install blueutil

The -p flag is a switch for turning bluetooth on and off:

# Turn bluetooth off
blueutil -p 0

# Turn bluetooth on
blueutil -p 1

This utility will be so helpful as I move around my house.  Since I can't use my touchpad during these situations, I can't turn Bluetooth off from the command bar, so a simple command like this is exactly what I need!

Recent Features

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Build a Slick and Simple MooTools Accordion

    Last week I covered a smooth, subtle MooTools effect called Kwicks. Another great MooTools creation is the Accordion, which acts like...wait for it...an accordion! Now I've never been a huge Weird Al fan so this is as close to playing an accordion as...

  • By
    Record Text Selections Using MooTools or jQuery AJAX

    One technique I'm seeing more and more these days (CNNSI.com, for example) is AJAX recording of selected text. It makes sense -- if you detect users selecting the terms over and over again, you can probably assume your visitors are searching that term on Google...

Discussion

  1. Patrick K

    Thanks for sharing this! I was trying to find an easier way to toggle Bluetooth and I kept finding articles about AppleScript, but this is way easier for people familiar with the command line.

  2. Ahmed Hossein

    Thank you! I just came across this and it was a life-saver.

    I created a small “bluetoggle.sh” to toggle the switch: ON if it was OFF, OFF if it was ON. I then used iCanHazShortcut to map the script to [^B] for ease of access.

    #!/bin/zsh
    
    if [ blueutil -p |grep 1 = "1" 2>/dev/null 2>/dev/null ]; then blueutil -p 0; else blueutil -p 1; fi
    
  3. Ahmed Hossein

    The code above was messed up by the interpreter (symbol ` is not accepted it seems). I put here the final code of my 1-line bluetoggle.sh

    https://pastebin.com/YssdgD5Z

  4. Ahmed Hossein

    This can be turned into a toggle command using:

    #!/bin/bash
    blueutil -p | grep 1 && blueutil -p 0 || blueutil -p 1
    
  5. Sean Beeg

    Thanks for this. Bluetooth has been crashing on my mac every so often, so a quick brew install and 2 aliases and I’m in business.

  6. Matt D

    Here is how I control my bluetooth from ZSH.

    bt () {
    	if [ -n $1 ]
    	then
    		echo $1
    		export btArg=$(echo $1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]') 
    		echo $btArg
    		case $btArg in
    			(on) echo "Turning on BlueTooth" >> /tmp/bt.log
    				blueutil --power 1 | tee /tmp/bt.log ;;
    			(off) echo "Turning off BlueTooth" >> /tmp/bt.log
    				blueutil --power 0 | tee /tmp/bt.log ;;
    			(stat*) echo "Checking BlueTooth state" >> /tmp/bt.log
    				export BT=$(blueutil -p | tee /tmp/bt.log) 
    				case $BT in
    					(0) echo "BlueTooth is powered off"
    						blueutil --connected ;;
    					(1) echo "BlueTooth is powered on"
    						blueutil --connected ;;
    					(*) echo "BlueTooth in unknown state"
    						blueutil --connected ;;
    				esac ;;
    			(*) echo -n "Unknown input" ;;
    		esac
    	else
    		echo -n "Need input"
    	fi
    }
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!